The San Diego resident is headed to Boston Tuesday for the World Cup of amateur radio, a quirky round-the clock contest featuring 59 two-person teams from 38 countries.

At 8 a.m. on Saturday, the teams will be huddled in tents pitched here and there across 90 miles of New England countryside, radios tuned, headphones on, antennas up, searching for anybody else who might be on the air.

They’ll have 24 hours to make as many contacts as possible, with more points awarded to connections in faraway places. Most points wins. So no sleeping.

“If you don’t hit the ground running and keep going the whole time, you will lose,” said Barcroft, 68, a retiree who lives in University City.

Amateur radio, more commonly known as ham radio, seems like a quaint hobby, a relic made obsolete by cellphones and text messages and Skype. The only time most people think about ham radio is when it’s needed because some kind of natural disaster or other emergency has knocked modern devices out of service.

But there are still more than 700,000 people in the United States serious enough about it to be licensed by the FCC, serious enough to form their own clubs and make their own T-shirts (“Ham Radio is a Contact Sport”), serious enough to keep life-lists, like bird-watchers, of every country they’ve visited via short-wave radio.

“It gets a little nuts,” Barcroft said.

Like many other enthusiasts, he became interested in electronics at a young age and discovered the magic of radio. He even made a career of it, as a broadcast engineer for KGB and other commercial stations. Then he found out about competitions.

The one this weekend, the World Radiosport Team Championship, happens every four years, like the World Cup or the Olympics, and contestants must win a series of qualifiers to even get there. In 2010, it was held in Moscow. There’s an opening ceremony, with teams from the different countries carrying flags. There are referees, who sit in the tents to make sure nobody cheats. And there are trophies for the victors.

But the real winners, in the long run, are all of us. Radio contests started as a way for operators to go out in the field and practice their emergency skills — skills that can make a life-or-death difference when an earthquake hits or a wildfire roars out of control.

“The reason ham radio exists is to provide a trained and skilled pool of operators and tinkerers who know how to make things work when chaos ensues,” said Glenn Rattmann, a contest referee who lives in Valley Center. “If an emergency happens, the better operators usually come from the competitive ranks.”

Hamming it up

Ask top ham radio operators how many countries they have on their life-lists and the answer is usually the same: “All of them.”

Their lists aren’t just of countries in the traditional sense, though. Radioheads break countries into zones that are counted separately. Hawaii, for example, is considered its own entity.